How the Internet Ruined This Year's Super Bowl Commercials

Super Bowl XLVI may not have been the worst ever in terms of the quality and buzzworthiness of the advertising, but it certainly generated the largest volume of bad reviews. Thank Facebook and Twitter for that. It's only in the last few years that fans across the country have been able to reach a critical consensus even before the final whistle blew. Such was the collective disappointment, the Obama 2012 campaign team tried to use it as a fundraising pitch, sending a text to supporters during the game reading, "The commercials aren’t that good this year anyway. Take a break from watching the big game to support Team Obama-Biden."

It wasn't just a matter of perception. This year's Super Bowl really was bizarrely underwhelming for an event that's supposed to represent the biggest day of the year in advertising. I blame the internet. In three distinct ways, it sapped the usual creativity and spark from this year's crop of spots.

1. The missing element of surprise. This one's obvious. Anyone who gives a fig about commercials had likely already seen most of the big ones by the time the game rolled around, since 75% of them were strategically "leaked" ahead of time. For the marketers, this may have been a worthwhile tradeoff. Why settle for one hit of exposure when you can get two? But the collective effect was to take much of the air out of the commercial breaks as events unto themselves.

Why are advertisers willing to pay $3.5 million for 30 seconds of airtime during the Super Bowl? Partly, of course, it's because the game routinely draws the biggest TV audience of the year. But it's also because it's just about the only broadcast of the year during which viewers are afraid to go to the bathroom at the commercial breaks for fear of missing something everyone will be talking about when they return. Another couple years of this and that won't be the case anymore.

2. Calculated virality. Sure, Super Bowl ads have always hewed to a handful of formulas: celebrity cameos, funny animals, etc. But the lack of originality in this year's spots represented a new nadir. With a handful of exceptions, they felt like little more than remixed versions of the most popular spots from years past.

3. The 30-second spot as afterthought. There was one big difference between a lot of the ads we saw last night and the ones we watched on YouTube or elsewhere over the past two weeks: The former were in many cases truncated versions of the latter. More and more, advertisers are shooting extended 1- or 2-minute spots for distribution on the internet and then editing them down into 30-second form for TV. The problem is a lot of the spots last night felt like poor man's versions of themselves. They lacked rhythm and narrative arc. I didn't think Honda's "Ferris Bueller" tribute ad was especially clever or well executed when I saw it last week, but it was a lot funnier and more cohesive than the TV version, which just didn't work. Advertisers need to get it into their heads that viewers can tell when a commercial they're watching is a byproduct.

I've been covering the business of news, information and entertainment in one form or another for more than 10 years. In February 2014, I moved to San Francisco to cover the tech beat. My primary focus is social media and digital media, but I'm interested in other aspects, ...